Disappearing act

(This piece is a humour) Last week Delhi disappeared. One moment it was there, large as life and twice as unnatural – with its VVIPs in pooh-paah cars and its child beggars, its stray dogs and strayer human beings, its killer buses and its road rage, its Metro construction and its unending rubble of excavation, its scams and its scandals, its power brokers and its power cuts, its Lutyens’ bungalows and its garbage heaps, its gracious tree-lined boulevards and its men pissing in public, its pomp and its pomposity, its pageantry and its piffle – and the next moment – poof! – it was gone. Just like that. Disappeared. Whatever could have happened to it? It was an enigma that had the whole country wondering.

Had some magician, a great jadugar like the legendary P C Sorcar ‘vanished’ the whole city, the way he is said to have once ‘vanished’ the Taj Mahal? Had aliens from outer space zoomed down in their UFOs and abducted Dilli in its entirety, Rashtrapati Bhavan, jhuggi-jhopris, polluted Yamuna, women molesters and all? But would aliens – no matter how alien they were – want to abduct the damn thing?

Mind you, Delhi had a long history of disappearing itself. In fact, if historians were to be believed, Delhi had disappeared itself some eight times, only to be reborn in a new avatar, Indraprastha, Shahjahanabad and so on. So had Delhi disappeared itself for the ninth time? And if so, what would it reappear as? Commonwealth Village? Gameswalabad? But according to a whole lot of people ^ reportedly including Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit – barring an act of God the 2010 Commonwealth Games were going to be the biggest non-event in the history of sport. In which case, would the disappeared Delhi remain forever in embryonic limbo as a never-to-be-born Kalmadigaon named after Suresh Kalmadi?

Then the mystery cleared. Delhi’s disappearance had nothing to do with magicians, or with aliens. Or indeed with Suresh Kalmadi. Delhi had disappeared because of fog. Not just fog, but the worst fog in 20 years. Some said it was the worst fog since either Delhi or fog had been invented. Whatever the case, for almost the whole of last week, fog – so thick and impenetrable that you felt you could cut it into huge chunks that would help replace all those melting Himalayan glaciers that R K Pachauri’s been carrying on something fierce about and which mayn’t be melting after all – smothered Delhi in a total white-out and wiped it off the face of the map.

In fog-blind Delhi, planes couldn’t land or take off. Trains were cancelled. Road traffic ground to a standstill. Thousands of Dilliwallas were stranded outside Delhi and couldn’t get back into the city, and thousands of non-Dilliwallas were stranded within the city, unable to get out.

And because of what? One three-letter word: fog. As in: Fog you too. Which is what a lot of all those stranded people kept saying as they camped out for hours and days at non-functioning airports and railway stations and bus depots waiting for visibility to return. Was this the pride of India, the showcase capital on which thousands of crores are being spent in the name of Commonwealth Gamesmanship? Some show, some case.

And then, miraculously, the fog lifted. The sun returned, blushing with shame for having gone awol and causing all the pother. And – poof! – as suddenly as it had disappeared, Delhi reappeared. Yes, by golly, there was Delhi back again. Delhi with its VVIPs in pooh-paah cars and its child beggars, its stray dogs and strayer human beings, its killer buses and its road rage, its Metro construction and its unending rubble of constant excavation, its scams and scandals, its power brokers and its power cuts, its Lutyens’ bungalows and its garbage heaps, its gracious tree-lined boulevards and its men pissing in public, its pomp and its pomposity, its pageantry and its piffle, its…

Oh God, make the fog come back again. Please?

(I’d like to thank reader Eustace D’Mello of Mumbai who suggested the theme for this column.)

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Author

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .